On the edge of evaporation: Robert Lee's desperate thirst

Lake now a big pond; town looks elsewhere

Patrick Dove/Standard-Times
Deep cracks in the lakebed of the E.V. Spence Reservoir near Robert Lee indicate how severe the drought has been in the region. Town residents are running out of water and hope to build a pipeline to tap into the supply of Bronte about 12 miles away.

The E.V. Spence Reservoir has dried enough that Robert Lee residents are running out of water. The town is waiting for approval of funding by the Texas Water Development Board to help build a pipeline to tap into Bronte's water supply 12 miles away.
photos by Patrick Dove/Standard-Times

ROBERT LEE — Robert Lee began searching for water long before E.V. Spence Reservoir all but disappeared.

After the driest one-year period in recorded state history, the town's lone water supply and main recreational draw is 99.55 percent empty.

It is the lowest the lake has been since it was created in the 1960s, when the Colorado River Municipal Water District dammed a part of the river. Droughts have come and gone since then, the level of the lake fluctuating accordingly, but the town of 1,049 now is faced with the most daunting water shortage it has seen since before Spence was built.

The lake now is small enough to be considered a large pond.

"It's probably as low as it's ever been," said Robert Lee Mayor John Jacobs, 65, who grew up in Robert Lee and is rounding out his first two-year term.

Before Spence was built, the town drew its water from Mountain Creek reservoir, a small impoundment on the northeast corner of town where Spence water now is piped as a preservation measure because it is deeper and less exposed to evaporation.

A search for a viable underground water supply had been under way before Jacobs' tenure and the onset of the drought last fall, but the search turned up only brackish water too salty to treat. The town now is planning to build an emergency pipeline to Bronte, a town of similar size 12 miles away with a stronger reservoir and active well field that produces good water.

"Coke County is not blessed with good ground water," Jacobs said. "It looked like time was gonna catch us before we could get that developed and a pipeline built."

Jacobs said the two towns view it as a two-way pipeline, a win-win for both towns who might share water in waterless times such as these.

There are, of course, a handful of Catch-22s.

Robert Lee, which has been under watering restrictions of one kind or another for more than two years, has cut its water use in half, and revenue from water sales correspondingly are down.

It is counting on millions of dollars of financial assistance from the Texas Water Development Board, the state's water planning agency, which has ranked Robert Lee No. 1 on its list to receive funding, to pay for the Bronte pipeline project and big upgrades to the water treatment plant. The package, worth more than $9 million, includes a $2.7 million low-interest loan, which the town will pay back, and $6.4 million in "loan forgiveness" — grants, more or less.

They plan to make up the difference with $850,000 in grants they're hoping to receive from other entities — one of which will pay for the pipeline material in lieu of volunteer labor to lay it.

The town began getting its first application together about a year ago. Two weeks ago, the TWDB approved Robert Lee as one of the candidates eligible to receive funding. The town sent in its second application last week.

Now, it waits.

"It's in their hands now, really," Jacobs said, expressing firm confidence that all will go as planned.

The TWDB has until the end of the year to approve or deny the application, but Jacobs said he is hoping to hear back sooner than that. Without significant rainfall — and climatologists are predicting another exceptionally dry year, possibly two — the town only has enough water to last through January. After it's approved, the pipeline project will take 60 days to complete. Jacobs said he is hoping they can begin construction by the end of November.

"It's got to come through," Jacobs said of the loan.

If they had to go to the private market for a loan, which would have a much higher interest rate, Jacobs said they would likely be forced to downsize the scope of the project because they don't want to increase water rates any more than they have to on residents, a large portion of whom are senior citizens on fixed incomes.

Although it is critical to the town's survival, Jacobs said the pipeline still is only a bare-bones fix. Under the contract struck with Bronte last month, the town would get 200,000 gallons a day for 40 years — an amount Jacobs said only will be enough meet basic needs. The town still will have to watch its water use closely.

"It will hold us at the status quo," Jacobs said. After the pipeline is laid, he said, the search for a viable source of underground water will continue. In the meantime, the quality of life has gone downhill in the town whose unofficial slogan is the "The Playground of West Texas."

As the water in Spence has diminished, so has the quality of the tap water, which has become intolerably salty and odorous.

"It tastes ugly and it stinks," said Delfino Navarro, a mechanic and handyman at a local car dealership, who stood on his browning front lawn on a recent afternoon with a bottle of water in hand. "You can't drink that water or you'll get sick."

The town's lake-based tourism — which had been on a downward spiral since the construction in the late 1990s of O.H. Ivie Reservoir, larger than Spence by a third and only 60 miles southeast — is shot. Every boat ramp leads to dry land where water a dozen feet or more deep once stood. The last of two marinas has closed. The weekend lake-goers from Midland and other cities, many who still own upscale homes on the edge of the sun-baked reservoir, have stopped coming, depressing retail business and municipal sales tax revenue.

Thirsty feral hogs have started to invade the area around the lake, which sits a few miles west of town, as there's no human activity to scare them away. The only green grass in town is at the local golf course, which is irrigated with treated wastewater. The course seemed a teeming Mecca on a recent weekday afternoon, with golf carts zipping across the startlingly green grass.

Most Robert Lee residents aren't thinking of leaving — yet. (The town lost 20 people in the last decade, according to 2010 Census statistics, but Mayor Jacobs said that's mainly because of death and young people moving away to find work).

"I guess we ought to get out of here, but we probably never will," said Kyle Long, who was born in Bronte but has lived in Robert Lee for more than 30 years. "There are a lot of things for sale, but a lot of people can't sell because nobody's going to buy anything here with our water situation. So you're just kind of stuck."

With grim drought predictions, residents are worried about what eventually will happen to the lakeless town.

State climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon has said much of the state still will be in drought this time next year, if not for longer, as La Niña, a periodic weather cycle that causes abnormally dry winters in Texas and was present last summer, has returned.

Ben LaRue, assistant manager at Allsup's, one of two convenience stores in town, said business hasn't taken a big hit yet because of the tourist deficit. He said deer hunting season has been less active this year, but that people still came to Spence in the summer because they hadn't heard how low the lake had gotten.

However, given the low probability the town will receive enough rain to fill up the lake anytime soon, he's afraid of what's going to happen next summer.